


not from the absence of violence

by essektheylyss (midnightindigo)



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Heavy Angst, Immortality, Killing, M/M, Religious Conflict, Survivor Guilt, Temporary Character Death, The Old Guard AU, Voluntary Surgery as Immortality Research, War, what's sexier than wizards? immortal wizards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-05
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:33:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26294194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnightindigo/pseuds/essektheylyss
Summary: A hundred years into a bloody crusade, two mages slaughter each other—again, and again, and again.Perhaps hunting an enemy who cannot die is as futile as fighting a war that will not end.
Relationships: Essek Thelyss/Caleb Widogast
Comments: 28
Kudos: 246





	not from the absence of violence

**Author's Note:**

> Bitches really look at The Old Guard and say "is anybody gonna write an AU for that?" and don't wait for an answer (I'm bitches). This was...... so fun to write. What's better than religious conflict and some mutual murder and immortal enemies to lovers, really.
> 
> Anyway, bon appetit, really.

_“We have not touched the stars,  
nor are we forgiven, which brings us back  
to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes,  
not from the absence of violence, but despite  
the abundance of it.”_

_\- Richard Siken_

This. This is the chaos of battle that keeps him alive.

There is something miraculous, he thinks, to be so entrenched in carnage and so detached from it. His brother’s blade is already in the throat of the soldier his spell is holding fast, and the man chokes on his own blood long before his heart stops beating. 

Essek thinks briefly that must be a horrible way to die.

But then, any death in a hundred year war with no end in sight is horrible. He has seen enough now to know that. There is no point to it, no justification, only endless, continuing conflict that leaves the Ashkeeper Peaks strewn with mangled bodies too numerous to retrieve before they decompose. 

Mostly, the corpses are burned where they lay, razing the mountainsides and leaving smoky beacons rising toward Exandria’s two moons. Catha is passing by Ruidis, a dark shadow of a thing against the grey-streaked sky. Between the glow of the fires, Catha’s full sphere, and the splash of stars, even the night is bright these days.

There’s nowhere to hide, even once the sun goes down, so their task is to make sure no one is left alive to follow them.

The corpse of the man hits the ground with a sickening squelch of a sound and they are granted a momentary reprieve as the fighting pushes away from them. His hand brushes against Verin’s shoulder, and his brother nods, silent, as they move in different directions back toward the fray, soft as shadows, and he flicks his fingers until he can almost see the runes shimmer in the air. Illusion falls upon him like a woven cloak and settles him into invisibility to wait to hear the cricket hum of Verin’s armor as signal to move again. 

The signal doesn’t come until it’s too late, and even invisible he’s exposed where he crouches among the dead—the roar of fire descends above him and he turns too late to leap out of its path.

He doesn’t see the man who kills him, only his silhouette, but he can picture his face in his mind the moment his sight goes dark.

—

The drow mage only becomes visible amidst an inferno, his body wracking as he burns alive.

Bren does not bring himself to care.

And yet, when he walks away unscathed from the battlefield, when he settles down in the safety of a dome in his sleeping roll, his head kissing scorched earth, when his eyes close, the elf’s face lingers behind his eyelids. Those silver eyes shoot open, gasping for breath, every moment in which he just reaches the edge of sleep, and he wakes once again with the same image in his mind.

—

Essek wakes amidst blackened bodies and finds that his own is unscathed.

He smells of soot and flame and the fabric of his cloak and his clothes are nothing but thread, but his metal armor maintains some modicum of modesty, though the outside of it still burns to the touch. 

The night is black and alight with stars and fire, but this portion of the hillside has been passed by the flames. He picks his way around the ashen remains of the fallen, bent low, and murmurs as he casts, “Verin. It’s Essek. I’m alive. Where are you?”

He cannot see his brother, but Essek knows his voice well enough to know that wherever he is, he’s gone very still, and very pale. “ _Essek_ … You burned. I watched you burn.” Essek doesn’t answer, waits to see if Verin will answer his question without having to cast the spell the second time. “Rendezvous point B. I’m here.”

—

Eadwulf notices. Of course Wulf notices. Astrid can read him like a book, but Wulf is the one who’s always _looking_.

“You’ve never had trouble sleeping before.”

That isn’t true, but Wulf doesn’t need to know that. For six months after Blumenthal, he shot awake amid dreams of fire and a burning husk of a building, choking on the smell of embers every time he tried to fall asleep. Now it is not the dying that keeps him awake; it is the idea that perhaps the dead are rising to haunt him.

“There was a Kryn mage,” he says softly, back turned to Wulf, head tucked into his elbow enough that his voice is muffled. Astrid might’ve spat, hissed the slurs she’d picked up from their teacher years ago, but Wulf says nothing. “He was invisible among the dead. I didn’t realize until he caught fire.”

“And did he die?”

He sees those silver eyes, the full moon reflected in the irises of them as the mage gasps, filling his lungs with life again.

“I think so.”

“You didn’t make sure?”

The hillside blazed with fire as the mage dropped, his echo knight compatriot rushing toward him accompanied by the insect buzz of his armor, screaming a name Bren couldn’t make out over the roar, then leaping back against the raging heat. There was no reaching him in that fire, and there was no way he could’ve survived it.

“I made sure,” Bren murmurs. “I watched his flesh burn away.”

He doesn’t look back to see Wulf’s ever-present furrowed brow. Instead he closes his eyes and thinks for the second time in his life that maybe one day he will throw himself onto a pyre of his own creation.

—

“You _burned_. I saw it. I saw your flesh…” Verin cringes against the thought, and Essek turns his head from his brother. “I saw the flesh of your face melt away like wax.”

Essek thinks he will never get the smell of burning flesh from his nose. 

“Maybe…” Verin has been having this discussion mostly with himself once a night for three days. He cannot reconcile his own mind with Essek standing alive and whole in front of him. Essek himself is having trouble reconciling the thought, but he is just grateful to be as alive and whole as he is.

In fact, it terrifies him how whole—Verin hasn’t even noticed that the scar on Essek’s shin where Verin had knocked him into a sharp table as a child is gone. His skin is as untouched as wet clay, even the callouses of his fingers where he holds a quill smoothed over. 

“Maybe the Luxon saved you,” Verin says finally, and Essek barks with laughter as he settles back against the rocky outcropping where they have made their cold, darkened camp.

“You and I both know that our mother’s god does not care enough about anyone of us as individuals for that.”

They have danced around the question of blasphemy that both of them think as this holy war rages on; whatever belief might’ve lingered from childhood has certainly been wiped out in the face of this violence. They accept their role in this war with nothing more than bitter resignation, but it takes a certain amount of cowardice to last as long as they have. That cowardice still holds the questions in their throats.

“No, I think if the luxon had any mercy I’d have burned with the corpses,” Essek says flippantly, but he avoids Verin’s hurt gaze. It also takes a certain amount of support to last this long, and had Essek died, his brother would’ve had to return to Rosohna or die in the mountains alone. 

As much as there is no heaven for them here, the thought of returning, not least individually, feels like resigning themselves to an eternal purgatory. Better to risk hell.

“Do you remember?” Verin murmurs, and leans against Essek’s shoulder. Essek thinks it is likely an attempt to remind himself that his brother is alive so his mind might accept it, so he doesn’t wake again crying Essek’s name as if he is not beside him. He doesn’t know that Essek has barely slept, that fitful rest filled with nightmares is better than no rest at all. He can see that wizard’s blue eyes and cold stare every time he closes his eyes, so he lies awake and watches Verin’s chest to make sure he’s still breathing. “Do you remember before the war?”

Essek remembers the strain on their father’s face, the soothing hum of their mother’s voice when his father spent long nights in court, the reassurances that it wouldn’t come to anything. That if it did, he’d be strong enough to face it, with the knowledge of whatever past life would resurface in time. 

By the time the war broke out, Verin had been born, and Essek was fifteen and waiting for a lifetime that never came, and the luxon was nothing more than a cold rock in his hand that beckoned him still with promises of black holes that could rip a man apart from the inside. There was only the future now, and a lifetime that offered only his queen’s crusade, and his baby brother’s wide eyes unafraid of violence that Essek could already taste, and he learned to weave reality in his palms to keep him safe in a world that would not. 

The luxon had never protected Verin. Essek had. In another life, he might’ve grown to be a scholar, but this life had handed him nothing but war, and a warrior he had become. 

“No,” Essek murmurs, closing his eyes and letting his head rest against Verin’s. “No, I don’t remember.”

—

It isn’t that Bren is unafraid of death. It’s just that everyday he moves with the knowledge that he will meet many people in battle, and in every meeting only one of them will walk away. It is always possible that the odds will not be in his favor, even if his opponent is outmatched.

Honestly, with those odds, with as many enemies as he greets in a day, it is probably a miracle that he has not been the one outmatched yet.

But he doesn’t believe in miracles, and he only sees luck as one piece of the puzzle that is his life in war—his companions guard his back, as he guards theirs, and he trusts his hands to know the runes as he casts. 

He has no illusions that these hands are made for anything but war, that he will live to see a world where they can imagine another use.

The heat of this battle surrounds him, the grass smoldering on either side of his feet, and through the haze he sees silver eyes and hair to match, a double image of a drow face and charred flesh.

He blinks the idea away and stumbles, his ankle wrenching as his toe catches on a rock half-embedded in the ground, and he is too caught in a dream to realize that he’s awake until the mage pulls his hands apart and a black galaxy opens around Bren, and he cannot fathom the force of it to even comprehend the pain as it wrenches him apart. 

—

“I killed him.”

Verin’s head lolls lazily to the side as he chews the hard jerky that allows them not to build a fire and alert anyone to their position in the night. “Who?”

“The wizard. The one who killed me.”

With a shudder, Verin’s eyes go dark. “No one killed you. You’re alive, jackass.” As soon as he’d stopped insisting that Essek had died, it was the only thing Essek could think about. The idea of it consumed him. Eventually he’d slept, but the nightmares remained, dreaming and waking. 

“The one who burned me, then.”

“You’re sure it was him? I didn’t even see him before he disappeared.”

Essek closes his eyes, sees the wizard’s slack, haunted expression behind his eyelids as the void opens around him. “I’m sure.”

—

He wakes shivering, naked, in a graveyard of ash. 

He doesn’t know when the armies began to light the bodies on fire instead of sort through them, leaving them to rest where they die, but he imagines that it is hard to rest in the afterlife when your remains continue to be trampled by the machine of war. The Dynasty, with its strange philosophy of rebirth, has little regard for the bodies of its fallen, and the Empire, with its insatiable taste for blood and its disregard for the wishes of the gods, has long since forgotten how to be reverent of the dead.

Bren’s own father never returned from the war, and he doesn’t expect any different.

But he is alive, somehow, and in the ash he sees the glint of metal—a pendant that had been around his neck. He picks it up, shivering to imagine the eyes of the Kryn mage on him, and puts it on, praying it will ward off the image of the elf even more than he prays it will keep himself out of the elf’s purview.

Something in him believes neither are likely, and that figures—it’s not like he believes the gods are listening to his prayers anyway.

He scavenges the least burned bodies for salvageable clothing with little regard for what side’s uniform he is wearing in this endless, bitter war.

—

Verin doesn’t turn over when Essek sits bolt upright, his heart racing, bringing the wizard’s eyes from his dreams to the space around him as though he’s watching Essek through the void of night. The moon has begun to wane, and the fires are distant—cover is easier to find now, but he still feels exposed.

“What if he’s still alive?” he breathes.

His brother isn’t asleep; his shoulders are too still, his breath too shallow. He turns over slowly, his eyes narrowed, and for the first time they both seem to be on the same page. “Like you’re still alive?”

It’s a simple question, but it knocks all the wind from his lungs. 

—

He can’t go back to Wulf and Astrid.

Well, he can’t find them anyway, in his mismatched clothing, the soles of his feet bare and raw and bloodied, stumbling along like an avatar of war. But the longer he thinks about it—they were standing yards away from him, watched a void of gravity rend him to dust. He doesn’t know how to explain himself, his existence. He can’t even explain it to himself.

He certainly cannot explain why his arms are bare of crystal and scars, clean as they were at fourteen, and though he aches to remember the pain of their insertion he misses the comfort they gave him, the power they allowed his magic. 

In any case, he knows what they will do when he arrives, a ghost in a solid body; he knows what he would do in their place. He has no intention of returning to Trent Ikithon, now with all the same capacity for pain and no relief. He had resigned himself to this war, this crusade, but he will not return to that.

He scrounges up components off of the edges of battlefields that have been forgotten as the armies moved on, where the dead still smell of rot and decay. He finds a rapier that he has to remember how to use from his training days, it’s been so long since he thought he might need to use one. 

The longer he walks, the less he feels like Bren Ermendrud, and he discards the name as he discards the clothing he wears for better ones when he comes across them. He chooses the name of his maternal grandfather, whom he never met but who was born before the war began, a man who knew a world before this. Bren was a man born to war, a man who would die to war, but the longer he walks without food, without water, and does not die, the more he begins to believe that he might be a man who will survive this, no matter how long it takes.

—

He spends every battle with part of his mind pulled to the Empire wizard, searching the eyes of the fallen for that keen blue before the corpses are set ablaze. His carelessness accumulates cuts from weapons that should kill him in one blow that do not leave scars, and he waits until Verin has gone to sleep to mend the rips in his clothing.

—

Caleb Widogast walks without a destination in mind, but there is one at the end of the path he’s on—he sharpens the blade he has stolen from the dead as he rests at night, and he thinks of the mage’s body skewered upon it. 

He doesn’t know what the Kryn have made him into, but perhaps if the mage that he dreams of dies at his hand, the mage will take him with him. 

If they cannot die apart, then perhaps they will die together.

It’s a meandering path that he walks, following the mage like a determined predator. He cannot say how he knows that the man is alive, or that his feet are leading him to him, but they exist on two ends of a string.

—

The feeling of foreboding, of expecting the wizard to appear at his back with a dagger, with another well-placed spell, only grows the more he succeeds in battle, and it is hard to hide his discomfort from Verin, who watches him with narrowed eyes as they eat their cold rations and alternate their rests. 

He shouldn’t keep his unease to himself, he knows—if the wizard appears while Verin’s on watch he may be caught unawares—but he has always tried to protect Verin’s fears as much as his body, and he can’t bring himself to disrupt Verin’s sleep.

The moon is new now, the stars the only light here, and even with his excellent vision the darkness feels too malleable to ground him. He lays with his head pillowed on his arms and tries to focus on the constellations to calm himself. 

He doesn’t realize he’s fallen asleep until he chokes on his own blood, waking to a blade pushing through his ribs. His blood tastes metallic on his tongue, the sting of the blade cold through his warm flesh. This death is slower than the first, and he knows now that he can feel this that he did, in fact, die in that fire—that he will die now. 

His heart pounds traitorously, every pump pulsing blood into his throat and he wonders if he will suffocate to death on it like the man that day in the first battle he laid eyes on the blue eyes that are furrowed above him, the wizard’s fists pressing into hilt of the blade, all of his weight on the weapon as his ragged breath matches the beating of Essek’s heart.

“ _Verin_ —“ he chokes out, pinned to the ground under the weight, his components out of reach and his fingers scrabbling desperately against the brush on the ground. Every breath, every pulse sends shards of pain spiraling through his limbs, and he gasps against it, his breath hitching with a gurgle around the blood. “ _Verin—_ “

“ _What did you do to me?_ ” the mage growls, his blue eyes dark with bloodlust and rage, and even if he understood what the man is talking about Essek can’t answer around the pain raging through his body and the liquid in his lungs, and his vision goes dark as the blur of his brother leaps onto the wizard.

—

The echo knight’s blade cuts across his back, and the sudden jarring pain loosens his grip on the rapier in his hands. The fighter’s weight hits him a split second later, sending them both toppling, and the drow straddles him, bringing his own sword, much larger than Caleb’s, plunging down into his own chest in approximately the same place he sent his own blade into the mage’s heart. 

“Why are you haunting my brother?” The man shouts at him with more rage than Caleb can fathom, his face mangled with grief. Caleb is choking on his own blood as the other mage had moments before, and the Kryn mage is collapsed on the ground, unmoving, soaked in blood, and Caleb hopes he doesn’t rise again because perhaps it means that Caleb himself will fall here and will not awake.

And he is falling, feels the pain more viscerally than he ever has, death coming over him in waves like a pulse and he gasps to answer, spitting out one word at a time: “ _He’s— haunting— me—_ “

All of the fury of a grieving brother washes over him as the man pulls away, gasping, the blade pulling out of his chest with a horrible squelch of blood and guts, and the stars overhead wink out one by one as he fades. 

When he wakes again, the blood congealing where it has soaked into his mismatched clothing, the two Kryn gone and a pool of blood still damp in the grass where his slain enemy laid.

—

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“I mean I don’t know!”

“Half of the blood in your body soaked into that hill, Essek!”

“I know, I know!”

Essek sits on the edge of an outcropping, the sun just beginning to rise over the Xhorhasian side of the Ashkeeper Peaks, and he thinks it might be the most beautiful sunrise he’s ever witnessed, crimson streaked across the sky. It is the same color as the blood that he has already magicked off of his clothing, and now he mends the front of his shirt, chest bare and shivering in the cool morning air. Verin paces in front of him, tugging on his long hair that has slipped from its braid in the haste of their flight. 

He seems too… frustrated? Unnerved? To put it right.

“Verin, please sit down,” Essek groans, combing his hands through his own hair. The phantom of healed pain is still there, in his chest, but it’s a low enough throb that he can ignore it now. 

Verin throws himself to the ground legs splayed out in front of him, and he looks like he did when they were kids, before they’d learn to kill with one movement. 

They’ve always been all the other had, really, since their father died and their mother retreated to her god, as she always did. 

If Essek cannot die…

He has no idea if this means he will live forever. But if that is the case, eventually, he has already realized, Verin will no longer live with him.

Everything he has done since he held a teething Verin in his arms and felt the enormity of the weight on his fifteen year old shoulders has been to protect his brother. And suddenly he is gripped with the certainty that he will outlive him lifetimes over, that his brother will grow old and feeble while he is forced to watch.

“It should’ve been you,” Essek mutters, and Verin’s brow furrows.

“What?”

“It should’ve been you!” he snaps, and his voice reverberates off of the side of this jagged mountain. He wrenches a hunting knife from his belt and, before Verin can lunge for him, drags it across his forearm, emitting a ragged gasp as the pain grips him. Verin yelps and throws himself forward, but the skin is already knitting together, leaving it smooth and untouched, so quick there’s barely any blood on the blade.

Verin dry heaves—he’s seen enough violence to be unfazed by the blood and the injury, but he is too entranced by the manic look on his brother’s face, and Essek thinks he must look a wretched sight. 

“It should have been you,” he snarls, enunciating. 

“I don’t even know what _it_ is,” Verin snaps back.

“Nor do I,” Essek says faintly, and drops the knife, hands shaking from exhaustion and fear and the overwhelming need to sleep and ignore that this is happening.

“And that Empire wizard?” 

Essek can still see him, behind his eyelids, every time he drifts closer to unconsciousness. For one night he wishes he could sleep without that face following him into the darkness of his dreams.

“What about him?”

“Is he…”

 _Like me? I don’t think he’s anything like me. And yet he is the same in every way that matters._ Essek can smell ash. He runs a hand over his face, the skin whole and unburned, and exhales slowly. 

“Yes.”

—

Caleb follows him, for a long time. They both know by now. They can’t actually say where the other is, really, but they know that the universe will push them together, orbiting each other like twin stars, waiting for moments of collision.

They come, eventually, clashing in sparks of metal and fire and force, ripping each other apart as if nothing else matters, as if the war is a trifling thing compared to the magnetism between them, two north stars shoving the other away. It is not a violence they care to keep at bay, and Caleb gets used to the pain like he got used to the thrumming ache of crystals in his arms that are now conspicuously absent like a missing limb. 

The mage’s brother is too careful, Caleb thinks, too watchful, seems to intercede more often than he’d like. Knows where Caleb is more often than he’d like. He is not a mage, he knows, only uses that strange gravity that the Kryn have perfected, in tandem with his wizard brother, and he cannot possibly be scrying on Caleb, not with what limited ability he has and with the pendant around his neck. Still, it feels as though he is always aware, always knows.

It chills him to the bone, for reasons that he cannot explain, when he steps between Caleb and his brother, guts Caleb up the middle, and leaves him to vomit as he dies. It is not the death that alarms him, no; it is the steely look in the man’s eye, the way he seemed to analyze how Caleb falls, how the wounds begin to stitch back together quicker than he’d like. 

It is the kind of look of a person sizing him up, and if he is leaving Caleb to recover on the battlefield, then he has something in mind for his brother.

Caleb has not come across his former companions, and he wonders if they have learned of his exploits. There are plenty of rumors that fly across the warfront, spreading as fast as the blood that soaks into the roots of the mountains, and he cannot imagine he has escaped that talk.

They dance together and apart, pushing and pulling like a rubber band, and he knows it won’t be long before the band frays and snaps.

—

How many more times he is destined to die at the hands of this Empire mage, Essek does not know. How many more times the man is destined to die at Essek’s hand, he does not know. 

All he knows is this is just one more complication in a war that is too simple to be halted—there is no end to blind belief except when everyone is dead.

And if Essek cannot die, then perhaps it will never be over; there will always be one person left to remember, and that is enough.

He has flashes of dreams in other places sometimes—a pleasant sitting room, mottled with sun; a sweeping library; the feeling of drowning, stuck at the bottom of an ocean that is too big to be fought with his hands.

Sometimes he wakes warm, and sometimes he wakes gagging for breath, as though saltwater might expunge itself from his lungs, but there is nothing there. Mostly he wakes up picturing the Empire mage, his gaze as sharp as any sword that he has used to cut through Essek’s skin.

Verin wipes the blood on his blade off on the thigh of his trousers and grins toward Essek. “Haven’t seen your mage in a few days.”

“No,” Essek murmurs, but he knows that they will find each other again. More worrisome is the waver in Verin’s smile, the narrowed eyes when he thinks Essek isn’t looking, and Essek wishes he would worry more about himself.

The next time he sees the mage he’s surprised by the concern in his face, even in the heat of battle. There is a pull to his brow that makes Essek stop in his tracks, twenty feet from Verin where he is out of reach. The man holds up a thin sword to his chest, sending a burst of fire into what is certainly now a corpse that was crawling toward his feet without looking.

“You will come with me.”

Essek blinks. He thinks he should be alarmed, and he thinks he should be casting a spell to escape whatever play the man is making, but instead he stands there, while the world starts to smolder around him. 

“Why?”

“Because your brother is going to sell you out to whomever in your country does magical research, and you and I both know that either one of these nations with access to true immortality will prolong the war until everyone is exterminated in the other.”

Essek glances back at Verin. Mistake. When he finds his brother’s eyes, they widen in alarm, and then he feels the _schick_ of the blade on his neck before the sky goes dark and he realizes that it’s probably easier for this man to transport him dead.

—

He wakes up with his hands chained to a wall and the first thing he thinks is that maybe this bastard is just into some fucked up shit. 

Then he remembers that he’s the captive of an enemy combatant, and neither thought is at all appealing. 

They’re in a cave, probably an offshoot of a tunnel in the mountains. He knows there are many meandering paths through the Ashkeepers—he’s used them enough. He also knows that they are so sparsely used and populated, even where they interweave with the Underdark, that there is almost certainly no one in the vicinity to hear him if he tries to scream.

And he wonders if he will be screaming soon, the way the human sharpens his blade.

“I’m sorry,” the man says wearily, and Essek eyes him, slowly pulling at the chains. He may need to break his wrist to escape, but that isn’t exactly a concern. “I couldn’t be certain you wouldn’t try to kill me the moment you woke.”

“Would it matter?” Essek exhales, leaning his head back and resting one arm against his knee. 

“I suppose not. But I thought starting calm might be the best path forward.”

“You are Zemnian?” Essek asks, and the man nods. “A Volstrucker?”

“My name is,” and he cuts off with a sharp inhale. “My name is Caleb Widogast.” He speaks the syllables of his name in a way that’s almost disjointed, and Essek cocks his head.

“That is not your real name.”

“It is my real name now,” he murmurs, and continues to sharpen the blade. “And no. I am no longer a Volstrucker. I imagine I have been scourged from the records that my masters keep, the last remnant of my life wiped away. So now I am just… Caleb.”

“Caleb,” Essek echoes, rolling the foreign name over in his mouth. “That is a good name.”

“It is a family name.”

“My name is Essek Thelyss,” he says softly, and sees the recognition register at his den name. “It is also a chosen name.”

“You had a different name as well?”

“No, no,” Essek mumbles, and pulls his wrist through one of the cuffs with a crack of the bones, and Caleb glances up as the break stitches back together. Essek waves gingerly. “Hands tied together is not the most comfortable position. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Caleb settles, but his movements are more skittish now, as though he’s waiting to be attacked. Essek thinks he should be just as concerned, but he’s already been tied up without further harm, so he settles back against the stone. 

“In the dens we do not have names until it is clear whether or not we will experience anamnesis,” he muses, thinking of nights lying awake in barracks in the bunk above his brother, shivering and wishing memories might arrive in his dreams for the first time. He was still not old enough to say for certain whether he was consecuted or not, but he was old enough to die for his country. 

Those had been bad years, when they’d first realized this war would last longer than they’d expected—when it had rapidly turned into a war of attrition, most young people had been drafted, and Essek watched his brother, barely reaching the point where he could be considered old enough to fight, turn from a child into a weapon before his eyes.

Those young people had been forced to choose their names early, almost unceremoniously. His own name was no exception, but he cherished it anyway—he and Verin had discovered the names of brothers, warriors, in a military history text from the fight against Lolth. His mother had kissed them both on the forehead and told them they’d chosen well.

Those brothers had fought together and died together. The envy that Essek holds for them will sustain him lifetimes over, he thinks.

“And this is the name you chose?” Caleb asks.

Essek nods. “My brother and I. We chose our names together.” He rubs both hands, one still chained, over his face, pressing the rough calloused fingers into his skin. “ _Fuck_ , they’re going to send Verin home. He can’t fight alone.”

“You are…” Caleb thinks for a moment, and then says the word in Undercommon, the accent butchered but an accurate translation nonetheless. The word for the pairs of fighter and mage that the Dynasty sends to the front does not have a direct counterpart in Common.

“Yes. Well, I… I suppose I was.”

“I am sorry,” Caleb says, and tosses Essek a waterskin. He drinks half of it before he realizes a key is attached to the leather strap, and he pauses for a moment to free his other hand.

“How did you know?” Essek asks. Even free, he doesn’t make any move to push toward the center of the cave; it would be far too easy to die here, over and over again, than walk back out onto a battlefield. Caleb raises an eyebrow. He’s settled into a comfortable rhythm now, secure in the belief that Essek won’t kill him while his attention is pulled. “How did you know my brother was going to send me back to Rosohna?”

“Every time I saw him, every time he… he killed me, he would watch,” Caleb says, and Essek imagines the way Verin’s gaze lingered on his healing wounds. “He was analytical. Curious. He watched me.” Caleb shrugs. “I just knew.”

Essek believes him. It would’ve damned them both to the Lucid Bastion, back to their mother’s house, too empty now that most have been pulled into the war effort. It would’ve probably damned him to more secure areas of holding—he has done nothing criminal but he knows the Dungeon of Penance is the easiest place to keep someone you want never to be found.

But the implications of it… they have never voiced the blasphemy in the backs of their minds, but they both know that whatever Essek is, it defies the Luxon and its teachings. And if the Luxon is denied in some way…

This entire crusade might come crashing to a halt.

The problem with this idea, Essek knows, is that he doesn’t believe his own mother would protect him over her precious god. The Bright Queen would look a fool if this many have died over a false god. 

“You do not wish to return to your queen in this state,” Caleb muses, examining the work he has done on the blade and his own reflection in the metal. “But you still must have questions. I can feel them, when I dream of you. They mirror my own.” 

Essek shivers and shuffles forward at last. “Yes. Yes of course.”

Caleb offers the blade, hilt toward Essek. “Would you like to find out if there are answers?”

Essek grips it in his hand. It is heavier than the blades he’s used to, when he does use physical weapons, but it is not unfamiliar—he trained on heavier weapons than this, decades ago. Still, he has no idea what Caleb wants with it. 

He looks… haunted, is the only word Essek can think of when he peers into Caleb’s eyes. “Carve me open. See if you can kill me.” He shudders out a breath. “This is a more blunt object than I would use for this purpose usually, but all of the tools I carry with me were disintegrated to dust by a very interesting spell. Was that a gift from your god?”

Essek blinks, laughs sharply. He rummages in the remnants of his things, and exchanges the sword for a dagger that he presents to Caleb. “But in the morning,” he clarifies, “I need some rest.” Then adds, “You are a fool if you believe there are any gods here.”

Caleb curls into himself like a cat as Essek sets both blades between them, retreats to ball his cloak into a pillow. “Ah,” he answers, half mournful and half reverent, as though he is worshipping whatever exists between the two of them, over the resting blades. “Then what are we?”

—

Aboveground, a war is being waged. Here in these tunnels, Caleb thinks there is more divinity than has ever been at stake on the surface.

Essek lights a small candle from his components and sets it upright beside him as he sits crosslegged in front of where Caleb has insisted he be restrained. He runs each side of the blade through the flame once, and Caleb kicks his foot out, straining against the binds. “No, no, it’ll cauterize—“

“I am only sterilizing it,” Essek says, and his voice is as soft as the flickering light. His silver eyes reach much further in the darkness, Caleb knows, but it is best that he can see what he’s doing here. He holds the knife between them, his brow furrowed. “If you are done with this, for any reason—“

They cannot die, and yet Essek continues to protect him in this way, and Caleb reminds himself that they’d spent weeks killing each other up until yesterday. “Essek, are we… are we friends?”

Essek’s smile curves, and the face of his enemy swims back into view. “Let us say for now that we are… not enemies. You understand the planes, no?” Caleb nods. “If the armies of the Empire and the Dynasty are clashing planes, warring for dominance, we have been shunted into a demiplane. A bubble.” He gestures around at this dimly lit cave. The tunnels through the Ashkeepers are numerous, and connect to the Underdark in many places, but for as many of them as there are, they are scarcely traveled, and for the first time in a very, very long time, Caleb is alone with another person. Even traveling with Astrid and Wulf there was a feeling that anyone might be around—that vigilance kept them safe and it also created many nights alternating watches and eating cold rations instead of lighting a fire. 

Here it is warm. Here the only person who can hurt them is each other.

“We have been thrown together by circumstance,” Caleb nods. “What side we were on is irrelevant, because we are here now.”

“Something like that,” Essek agrees. Neither of them can even bring himself to suggest that they are allies—this is something more. What monarch or holy war matters when they may outlast it all? “Are you ready?”

Caleb closes his eyes and waits to feel the panic that always consumed him in the laboratory where unfeeling mages cut open his skin and embedded shards of crystals there, but the panic doesn’t come. When he looks again, Essek is still waiting for his cue, and Caleb almost chokes on the relief that wells in his throat.

Pain is a given. Harm is a different thing entirely, and he knows so certainly somehow that it will not come to that.

They are both so tired of war.

He clenches his fists to prepare for the pain. “I’m ready.”

—

Essek learns very quickly that this man has a high tolerance for pain, in a way that almost scares him.

With every cut, Caleb’s breathing catches, then settles into an even rhythm that drums into Essek’s skull, and he fixates on it as he works, ignoring what he is doing as if that can make him feel less like a butcher. Every so often it fades to nothing, and Caleb barely notices as it does, uncaring as he dies and his heart kickstarts again, Essek holding his breath in the meantime.

He expects Caleb to tap out, at some point.

He doesn’t.

Finally Essek leans back on the soles of his feet where he is crouched and drops the knife. “I’m done. I can’t— I’m done. For now. You need to rest.”

Caleb is streaked with blood running from wounds that have long since closed, seeping into the waistline of his trousers, and Essek can’t bring himself to cast the simple spell that will wipe it away. He has to look on what he has done, or it will start to feel normal to him, and that is the one thing he cannot allow. 

If everything from healing to cleaning up the damage is easy, then he will never be able to allow himself to kill again. And they are still in the middle of a war zone.

“I’m fine,” Caleb sighs, and drops his head back against the stone wall. “We need to…” he almost falls unconscious again, but shakes himself awake. “We need to find out what this shit is.”

“And if there are no answers?”

“There are always answers. There is always an explanation.”

Essek has seen too much senseless violence to believe that’s anything more than a platitude, and both of them know it. “I do not believe in the Luxon. I know that it exists because its strain of magic is unique, but I do not believe it is a god. I do not believe it cares for any of us. I have seen the clerics of the Pantheon do wonders and I still cannot say for certain that those gods care for us either. Sometimes, there are no answers to why.”

“Then what else do you suggest we do?” Caleb offers his hands, which are still restrained, and Essek unlocks the cuffs. “Return to a war neither of us believe in? Run away from violence that we have had a hand in creating? What the fuck do you think we should do besides try to figure out why us?”

Essek’s words to Verin echo in his head. _It should’ve been you._ He doesn’t have a good answer—there has never really been a choice for him, not from the time the war began, so being without a path forward is dizzying.

“What do you believe in, Caleb Widogast?”

“Ah, I…” he trails off as he thinks, sitting crosslegged and resting his chin in his palm. “I believe in myself. I believe that the arcane will serve me the same way every time I use it. I believe that the king and the queen of our respective nations—perhaps our former respective nations—want nothing less than total surrender or complete annihilation and will do anything to get it. I believe…” he trails off, and there is a melancholy slack to his face. These are the only certainties he has been afforded in life. Essek understands that. “I think I might believe in you, after today.”

Essek has spent hours cutting this man open, seeing how he bleeds, how his body responds to violence. He puts his face in his bloodied hands and his breath comes in jagged waves. 

—

From the time Caleb had caught Essek’s body on the battlefield, he’d recognized how much smaller the drow was than him, but that doesn’t register until he is shaking Essek awake in the middle of the night as he screams, gripping thin, wiry shoulders that have seen plenty of battle and probably as many skipped meals. 

Essek sits up, barely hearing his own panted breath, and stares at Caleb with eyes so wide Caleb worries that perhaps he has forgotten where he is. 

“Sorry, I’m sorry,” Essek breathes. “I was dreaming…” 

He trails off, but Caleb knows. He saw the bottom of an ocean, felt the liquid in his lungs. He’s just better at waking himself from such nightmares, it would seem.

“Well, try not to scream too much,” Caleb offers, holding out a hand to help Essek up into a sitting position. “We seem to be alone for now, but the gods only know who else might be wandering these tunnels.”

Essek curls into himself, gripping the soles of his boots. He looks young—surprisingly young, in fact. He’s discarded his armor and balled up his cloak beneath his head, and without all of the accoutrement of war, Essek’s youth is astounding. Caleb has never quite comprehended how elven aging works, but it seems as though Essek has spent quite some time in battle, but he’s still only just an adult. 

He cannot imagine what the effects of war are on such a long life.

“Of what did you dream?“

“Drowning,” Essek exhales, spat like a curse, and he curls his knees in toward his chest. He offers Caleb a wry smile. “I feel foolish, being so affected.”

“I saw it too,” Caleb offers gently, and reaches out to gather Essek’s hand in his own, rubbing circles into the place between his thumb and forefinger. “I don’t think it is foolish. I think it is a good sign, that such horrors still manage to disarm you.”

Caleb does not point out that he cannot say the same about himself.

Still, Essek eyes him up and down, and he seems to realize. He certainly has a sharp eye. “And what do you think it takes to witness such things unfazed?”

“Personal nightmares,” Caleb smiles.

Essek stares at him for a long moment, his expression inscrutable, and it feels like a chasm between them serves as a burial ground in which to launch each of their past crimes. Perhaps one day they will have compiled enough of them to build a bridge, but for now they are peering at each other from opposite sides and shouting into the void.

“Do you genuinely want me to continue to butcher you in a likely hopeless attempt to find the cause of this thing?” Essek exhales, and Caleb follows his gaze to his own palms, where the blood has been wiped clean. “What is this gaining us?”

It’s a good question, and Caleb doesn’t have an answer, but it feels as though there is little other option. Perhaps given enough time and materials, they could ascertain the nature of whatever has happened to them, and how, maybe, but materials are scarce and time… well, time, he supposes, is no longer the obstacle it once was.

Caleb also doesn’t know if being the butcher or the meat is better, but he knows that he does not trust his own hands. It is the main reason he did not take Essek up on his offer to switch places.

The man in front of him was his enemy thirty-six hours ago, and now he is comfortable enough to sit unarmored in front of him and talk about dreams. Very strange, what seeing a person’s insides will do.

He scoots closer to Essek, who rests his cheek on his knees and watches Caleb approach. 

“What do you want to do? What do you think we should do?”

Essek shudders out a breath and closes his eyes, and Caleb has the strangest impulse to reach out and run a hand over his cheekbone. Especially strange that he feels that is a line he cannot cross. They can continue to hurt each other in many ways, but perhaps caring is beyond them. Perhaps he war has stripped them of any way to soothe.

Caleb feels his skin prickle. He spent many nights pressed up against Wulf or Astrid or cradled between them, and even that connection was cold and sharp as the metal of their weapons. What they had had not felt warm in years, if it ever had, but it was as much as any of them deserved.

He still does not believe he deserves anything more. 

“I… I do not think that there are any further answers we can gain by cutting ourselves open for days on end. I do not think it wise to attempt to wait out this war underground, even if we can outlast it. But I…” He looks up to the ceiling as though he’s searching for a god to pray to, but Caleb focuses on the glimmer of silver in his eyes. “I have known nothing but war since I was fifteen,” Essek says, with a dark laugh. “As much as the magic I use allows me to play with fate, I have never been given the opportunity to carve my own.”

“And where would we go to find such an opportunity?”

Essek hums thoughtfully for a moment, still looking toward the ceiling. “The ocean. The Coast. If someone else—“

“Yes,” Caleb agrees. They sit in silence, both wondering if they will manage to fall asleep with the thought of drowning in their dreams.

“Is it cowardice?” Essek asks finally. “To run from this war?”

“I don’t know.”

“If others die when we would’ve lived…”

“What good would it do?” Caleb exhales. “What good does this war do?” It’s the first time he’s ever allowed himself to ask the question out loud. He has spent two decades justifying his continued presence here, every kill, by saying that the Dynasty came looking for a fight, and they are only defending themselves. But that hasn’t been true for a very long time, and certainly not since before Caleb arrived on the battlefield. “What was it like?” he whispers, and Essek looks at him.

“What was what like?”

“The war. At the beginning. Was there a purpose to it?”

“Not since I arrived. I cannot say if it had purpose at the beginning—I was a child then, and naive. I thought perhaps it would end quickly, but I also… I have never believed in my mother’s god, and I have seen the lengths to which holy people will go to preserve their beliefs.”

“Then why did you join?”

Essek laughs again. It is a laugh that Caleb thinks a god could not comprehend. “Because it was expected.” His face falls, and Caleb can feel the ghosts in the room, all of the people they have both killed, all of the men they have never had the chance to be. Every possible version of them, slaughtered by their own hands. And now they are here, stuck as they are, with hands bloodied and flawed from weaving their own noose. “If a man kills on behalf of a god in which he does not believe, because his country expected him to, then what does that mean for him?”

“It means his country has failed him.”

“I think it must make me a murderer.”

Caleb raises a hand to reach across to him, thinks better of it—but Essek follows the movement with his eyes. “Your country—my country—we have been offered up as sacrifices, and we are survivors.”

“And what does that make the people who have died at our hands?”

A long, shaky breath before he answers. “Dead.

Essek exhales, fidgets with an object among his things on his other side. Finally, he turns back to Caleb and offers him the knife. “Cut me open.”

Caleb stumbles over his breath trying to speak, drawing back. “Why?”

“Because the blood on our hands ought to be our own.”

—

Blood is the only absolution they understand. 

—

By the time they leave the cave, the ground has been bathed in it, the floor colored rust and what is left of the identifying pieces of their uniforms piles in the center and set on fire, the smoke filling the chamber once it is empty of anyone who might breathe it. 

They work their way through the mountains. Neither of them are familiar with the Menagerie Coast, and they have no interest in getting caught unawares, so they walk. They don’t discuss it really, but it was hard enough leaving their bloody cave—a war zone is all they have known for so long, and neither of them can quite believe that it is something they are allowed to shed.

—

At a certain point, the mountains will become too jagged to wage war upon, but until then, they don’t light fires when they stop, and this high into the peaks, the wind whips against their exposed skin. Neither is certain when they start sleeping tucked together, Caleb’s longer limbs usually curled around Essek, and they don’t discuss it when they wake like that but they are both grateful for the warmth and the company. 

They still don’t quite trust each other, but what are you risking when you’re invulnerable? It’s hard to get over decades of programming of suspicion, but not having to worry about survival certainly makes it a little easier. 

Once they start climbing, hefting each other onto boulder that are bigger than they are, their progress slows considerably. They sleep on the side of a cliff, tucked into the rocky face, a small fire of Caleb’s design warming the space of it, and Essek pulls out his spellbook.

“What are you working on?” Caleb asks, peering over his shoulder at the shorthand he has not yet learned to decipher. 

“When I was a child, I used to think about creating spells. Interesting things, strange things. There are plenty of applications of dunamis that have not been explored, and I… I wanted to build them.” He smiles briefly, then falls back into a bout of melancholy. “That wasn’t in the cards, then, but… perhaps now something might come in handy, hmm? Something that makes it a bit easier to climb.”

“Like what?” Caleb asks, entranced, and his eyes look like they are aflame with the reflection of the fire. Essek’s stomach twists, his heart racing for a moment, and it’s only when he looks down at his spellbook and notices his ears burning with embarrassment does he realize that he has never found anyone that beautiful. He hates it, a bit. But then, he’s never trusted anything beautiful.

And he realizes very suddenly what he still has to risk, even with his survival no longer on the line.

He swallows hard and looks up at Caleb again, quashing the thought. That line of thinking feels like it’ll only lead him off one of these cliffs. He focuses on the spell possibilities, the things he can do without materials or extensive research libraries, and he hums with excitement. “Like… like _floating_.”

“Floating?”

“Yes—it’d get us far more ease of movement,” he nods, and picks up his quill again to start to scribble out equations. His handwriting is beautiful when he isn’t writing quickly, but his fingers are shaking a little as he builds the foundation of a spell of his own creation. 

“Like flying?”

“Not exactly. Flying, as I’m certain you know, requires you to think about it, but this… this is making gravity work for you.” He laughs. “It’s so simple, I’m surprised no one’s done it yet.”

Caleb claps him on the shoulder, beaming, and his skin prickles under his grip. “ _You’re_ doing it, friend.”

They go silent for a moment, as they both register the word that has slipped from Caleb’s mouth, then Essek smiles. “I like that. Friends.”

—

It certainly feels like flying, when they are up this high. The treacherous peaks of the Ashkeepers are their own private heaven.

Essek has never cared much for religion, but as he takes Caleb’s hand in his to pull him up to the next outcropping, nothing below them but cloud, he thinks this must be what it means to believe in something.

—

He doesn’t think about Astrid and Wulf, the same way Essek doesn’t think about his brother—that is to say, they dance around their own questions about what has become of those with whom they’ve spent all their time in war. They discuss whether perhaps the Dynasty and the Empire cannot see eye to eye because of their drastically different lifespans, and do not add that this means they have more in common with each other than any member of their respective nations. 

They do not speak of the people they have killed to escape this war, or the people they have killed to survive it. It is enough that they both know. 

Perhaps that knowledge sits too deep inside of them both when they crest a mountain at dusk and see the ocean, laid out before them, miles away still but seemingly infinite. From up here the lights of Nicodranas are just visible, a glowing beacon of a city, and ships sail along the routes that hug the coast. On the horizon there are masses of deep purple land that rise from the waters, islands scattered in the Lucidian Ocean. The deep blue of the ocean still glitters with the last rays of dying sunlight.

Essek stares hungrily at it, even as his body tenses with the fear of the path forward—but Caleb sinks to his knees beside him, and when he looks down at him, tears streak his face.

There is a tiny part of Essek that has always assumed he would leave the battlefield one day—he had survived as long as he had for a purpose, and he was going to see it through. 

He suddenly, viscerally knows that Caleb never thought he would see anything outside of this mountain range again.

Essek sits down beside him and puts a hand on his shoulder, and together they watch the last of the light fade, giving way to an endless void of stars that reaches the beach in the reflection of the sea. After what feels like hours, Caleb heaves a labored sigh and leans into Essek’s shoulder, and Essek doesn’t know what to do aside from wrap an arm around him and remind him that they’ve made it, they’re out of the woods now, they can do whatever they want.

“And what is it we want?” Caleb whispers, and Essek doesn’t have an answer—the only thing he can think to do with any actual purpose is to walk back into a battle and fight and kill until the war is through, but they have both acknowledged that that is a futile impulse. Blood begets blood; it’s the only thing they know right now with certainty. 

It is terrifying, and exhilarating. 

“We want peace,” Essek exhales, and presses his lips to Caleb’s hair without thinking. Caleb tenses for a moment, but he doesn’t move. With how many mornings they’ve woken up wrapped together, they have not spoken of it, and bringing it into their waking hours feels like an entirely different action.

“Is there peace to be found in this world?” 

Essek smiles into his hair, which has grown long enough during the course of their journey that Caleb has taken to tying it back, but at the end of the day, it is mussed and falling out of the leather cord that holds it at bay. “We have eternity to look, do we not?”

—

They pick pockets in Nicodranas, Essek watching for guards and Caleb doing the deed, looking for the people who seem like a missing purse is something they can afford, but no one powerful enough to really hurt either of them if found. They can’t be killed, of course, but that doesn’t mean they want anyone here to try.

They share a shitty inn bed, and it’s the best rest either of them have had in about as long as they can remember. “Pillows,” Caleb grins, plumping his own dramatically as if he’s never held a pillow in his hands before. “I nearly forgot about pillows.”

Essek’s heart swells as Caleb falls over into it, half of his face obscured in the truly thin pillow, but he looks happier than Essek has ever known him.

For a moment he wants to kiss the lid of the eye that he can see, and when Caleb opens that eye and look up at him, he has to swallow the impulse away.

—

They pick the wrong pocket, once. 

The man twists Caleb’s fingers, breaking them instantly, and Caleb gasps out. He hears Essek’s approaching footsteps, nearly whisper soft, but he’s already out of time—and as the man turns to see who has dared to try to steal from him, Caleb notices too late the leather Crownsguard armor under his coat. 

“I’ll bring you in for that—“ the man snarls at him, before Essek’s blade sprouts from his chest, a dagger thrown with the kind of precision that only military training can imbue. 

He looks down at the blood that blooms on his chest in shock, then collapses, and Caleb’s fingers haven’t even had the chance to heal all the way before Essek yanks his blade back, wiping it on the coat, and notices the symbol that it has just pierced with grim resignation. He holds out a hand to help Caleb up from where the pressure on his hand dropped him to his knees.

“We should get out of here,” Essek murmurs, and they flee Nicodranas before the morning light has dawned.

—

Essek only considers what he’s done once they’ve stopped, thirty-six hours later, when they’ve put enough distance between Nicodranas and themselves that they feel safe enough to stop. They camp on the beach and Essek contemplates throwing his blade into the ocean. 

“He would’ve hauled my ass off to prison,” Caleb says gently, as Essek faces the water and holds the metal hilt in his hands. His grip is so tight that his knuckles are white in contrast to his skin, and Caleb eases the weapon out of his fingers. 

“I am afraid that this is all we will ever be good for,” Essek whispers, and Caleb pulls him back toward their small, dying fire and wraps his arms around Essek’s shoulders until they both fall asleep. 

—

They are nearly asleep on the other side of Feolinn when Essek sits bolt upright, his mother’s voice in his head, his heart pounding with each additional word. “ _Essek, if you’re still alive, please come home—Verin’s been hurt._ ”

He bites his palm to keep from making a sound until the magic runs its course, but the moment he feels the enchantment leave him, he shudders out a sob, and Caleb sits up beside him, catching his shoulder. “What is wrong?”

“My brother,” Essek murmurs, his heart racing. “My brother’s been hurt. I don’t know how but—“

He moves to stand, but Caleb catches his arm. “Essek, it could be a trick.”

“Yes, and it might not be a trick!” He rips his hand out of Caleb’s grip and throws himself to his feet. Caleb follows him without a thought, moving carefully around him like the moon orbiting overhead. “I need to go, I need to see—“

His pack is already on his shoulders, but Caleb finds his fingers, trying to write runes in midair, and stops him before he can complete the spell. 

“Essek,” he murmurs, his voice breaking, and presses one hand to Essek’s cheek. “You cannot go back to the Dynasty. You have done so much to get this far.”

“And what if my brother dies?”

“We have already resigned ourselves to never seeing our families again,” Caleb stammers, but Essek shoves him away, anger flashing hot on his face.

“Your family is already dead,” Essek snarls, and an ugly grimace crosses Caleb’s face. They stand apart, faces shining orange in the glow of the coals of their fire. The light feels like a false echo of what they are—it is overcast and too dark here to feel like they are real, and for the first time, Essek finds himself praying for home. Praying for something beyond the empty yawning mouth of what lies ahead on this path. There is nothing here but survival, and while that is the case they will always be alone, even when they sleep beside each other at night.

“What do you think they will do if you return?” Caleb asks in the silence, between the distant sound of the tides on the shore. “If your brother lives or if he doesn’t, you will still be at their mercy.”

And that, of course, is the crux of the issue—is it better to survive alone with family he will outlive, or here with a man who he has only recently learned to trust? 

“I’m sorry,” Essek whispers. “That was cruel.”

When he hesitates, Caleb steps forward, the hurt of Essek’s word still stinging in his eyes, but he gathers their hands together. “Stay with me. Please, stay with me.”

“Maybe that isn’t what we deserve,” Essek murmurs, and Caleb gives a harsh, bitter laugh, but he grips the back of Essek’s neck and presses their foreheads together.

“Fuck what we deserve,” Caleb breathes. “If we are meant to live forever, if the two of us were chosen to live forever, then we cannot be asked to do it alone. There must be a reason.”

“A purpose,” Essek says, his eyes closed, and he hopes that it’s true.

“We can _find_ that purpose.” Caleb’s breath brushes across Essek’s lips. “But we cannot do it alone. I cannot do it alone.” When Essek looks at him, his heart flutters in the darkness—it feels for a moment that there is nothing but the two of them, alone in the empty bowl of the sky. “Please, come with me. We can _do_ something.”

Essek shudders, his shoulders dropping with every exhale, and finally, when he cannot stand the weight of this decision anymore, he presses his lips to Caleb’s. 

Caleb leans into him, and kisses him breathlessly, and wraps his arms so tightly it seems as though he is afraid that Essek might dissolve beneath his grip. “Please,” he says finally, the word whispering against Essek’s mouth. “Please stay.”

Essek thinks of his brother, who will die one day if he returns or if he doesn’t, and he thinks of Caleb, who will be here with him as long as they are both alive—that is to say, forever.

He nods, finally, tears welling in his eyes and fingers reaching to hold tightly to Caleb’s wrists, and they stand on the edge of the continent and the edge of the world for a very long time, willing their minds to believe that this is something that will last an eternity.

—

The money they’d stolen in Nicodranas runs out in Port Damali, and Caleb brushes a kiss across his fingers before they split up to find a mark.

He watches from the mouth of an alley that Caleb plays the part of a clumsy beggar, brushing into a man with clothes that are unassuming but too well-pressed to be anything but well-off. He is several inches taller than Caleb, but Caleb steadies himself against the man’s arm, his other hand grasping toward the purse on his belt, and the man turns—

Essek’s heart leaps into his throat at the sight of the yellow eyes he recognizes from nightmares of drowning, and he starts forward into the crowd.

In slow motion he sees Caleb freeze, though the man only raises an eyebrow and says something in a calm low voice that Essek can’t hear over the crowd of the busy bazaar. His foot hits the rough cobblestone of the street, and a woman his size catches him, a familiar flash of blue like a dream, and gives him a grin as wicked as the sharp points of her horn.

“We’ve been looking for you,” she says cheerfully, with a lilting accent that Essek recognizes from their brief stay in Nicodranas. “Do you want to get lunch?”

—

The establishment their new companions have chosen for lunch is nice enough that it makes Caleb’s fingers itch, and it takes all of his attention to avoid looking for people to rob—he directs the energy into searching for threats instead.

Below the table, Essek grips his hand tightly, as on edge as he is, but he at least grew up in higher society than Caleb has ever known. He sits with perfect posture and uses the correct utensils, and he makes calm small talk with the half-orc even as his fingers flutter over Caleb’s palm.

“You don’t have a last name?” Essek asks in mild surprise. 

“He uses mine,” Jester smiles, that same wicked grin, and Fjord, on Caleb’s other side, gives a very heavy sigh.

“Yes, the, ah, orphanage I grew up in, they gave me a name, but… it’s been so long I’ve elected to forget it.”

Caleb thinks of the name he shed and wonders if he will live long enough to forget it.

“So what do you do?”

“Well, last week we found a bunch of guys in the sewers who were fronting for the Myriad,” Jester offers, as a waiter brings them another pot of tea. “We got a _bunch_ of money for that.”

“We travel a lot,” Fjord adds, halfway between a bite of salad, and Caleb has never felt as starved and as nauseated as he does right now. His own salad sits wilting under its dressing on his plate as his eyes scan the restaurant. He notices Essek follow his gaze every so often—they’re both jumpy enough from their encounter in Nicodranas, as if they were not suspicious enough to begin with. Fjord leans forward and catches Caleb’s eye. “Something the matter?” he asks, a measure of gravitas about his voice and low enough for Jester to engage Essek in another topic of conversation, and Caleb swallows.

“No, no,” he says with false lightness, and squeezes Essek’s fingers again.

“We aren’t going to be attacked here,” Fjord says, and beneath the table, where only Caleb can see it, something shimmers in his hand. A sword materializes, white and ornate, and Caleb’s throat is dry, but Fjord catches his eye kindly. “And if we are, it won’t be a problem.”

“You were both in the war?” Jester asks, across the table.

Essek nods and they lock eyes, thinking of battlefields unimaginably far from this restaurant, with its open windows and sea breeze and sunlight. “Yes. Ah… I suppose we are both deserters, technically.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Fjord waves. “We have a friend in Nicodranas that helps us with that kind of thing. We’ll have that cleaned up for you.”

That sounds like the type of freedom that is too good to be true.

“And what is that in exchange for?” he asks, and Jester pouts.

“He wants to help, so when he has jobs for us, we help,” she says.

“He’s also a very learned mage,” Fjord adds, looking between the two of them. “He may be of assistance to you both.”

They don’t answer, a silent conversation passing between their eyes—they have both been taught by learned mages, have been sent to war by the same mages who taught them to kill. It’s hard to imagine trusting a wizard who is not one of the two of them. 

“Do you want to end the war?” Jester asks lowly, and neither of them answer for a moment. Caleb knows that Essek is thinking of his brother, his mother—Caleb thinks of the other children like him who have been sacrificed to this endless conflict.

“Of course,” he mumbles.

“We have heard the rumblings of war since the Dynasty and the Empire began to interact,” Fjord says, quiet enough so his voice doesn’t carry. “We have watched this fighting last for decades.”

“As have I,” Essek snarls, and Fjord sighs. 

“What I mean to say, is that we do not have nearly as much personal experience with it as the two of you. We have another member of the team who is of the Empire—“

“A mage?” Caleb asks, half excited, but Fjord shakes his head.

“She works for the Cobalt Soul, she’s the reason we are in Port Damali, for their archive,” he says. “We want to help end it.”

“Will you come meet our friend Yussa?” Jester asks them, and both of these people look between them expectantly. It feels like the first time they have had a choice in a long time.

Perhaps ever, Caleb muses.

—

Jester whispers into the air, her fingers humming through the air to form runes that Essek recognizes. “Yussa! We’re outside your door! We found them, we want to introduce you!”

Caleb grips Essek’s fingers tightly in his own as they peer up at the tower. There are no doors that they can see, but there are several balconies high overhead, a window with a little flower box. It is the kind of wizard tower that neither of them have the luxury of, where privacy is a given. 

Maybe it’s the kind of home they could have someday, now. In a life where their first instinct is not to kill but create, maybe it’s the kind of home they could build.

A door materializes at the base, and a well-dressed goblin peers up at them as he holds it for them. “Good afternoon, Wensforth,” Fjord says with a polite nod, and the goblin bows graciously as they pass.

They wait in the sitting room for ten minutes, awkwardly sipping the tea that Wensforth offers. Caleb and Essek glance at each other, at the beautifully upholstered furniture, at the sharp spice of the incense in the air. Finally, a door opens, and a dark-skinned elf with golden robes sweeps inside.

“Immortal mages,” Yussa Errenis _hmphs_. “I thought I’d seen it all.”

He sits down in his ostentatious armchair and collects his own tea with a spectral hand. Essek squeezes Caleb’s hand in his lap. Yussa raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t comment.

“They’ve been in the war,” Jester whispers, too loudly to really be a useful whisper, but Yussa nods and leans forward. “They want to learn other things.”

“Yes, I suppose one would,” he says, and takes another sip of his tea as he examines them up and down. “I don’t care for war. And I don’t care much for the magicks employed there. But we can work on that.”

Caleb bows his head referentially, and Essek thinks that not too long ago neither of them bowed to anyone, that survival is lonely but living is a form of grace. “We are eager to learn more. Jester and Fjord… they told us you can help us. That _we_ can help. Be of use.”

Yussa glances to the others with a raised eyebrow, and Essek follows his gaze to Jester, who nods emphatically. “You both have a personal stake in the conflict to the north. You have seen what kind of destruction it begets.”

“Yes,” Essek says, almost involuntarily, like the images of the war behind his eyes. 

“Then you will be glad to know that we—Fjord, Jester, the rest of their team, with my aid—are working to end it. To put a stop to the countless, senseless killing.” Essek’s heart leaps in his chest. He wonders if his brother is already among those dead, caught in the cog of the war machine, and he prays—to whom, he doesn’t know, but he prays—that it’s not too late. “And you would be a great asset in that work.”

Caleb meets his eye, with a fire behind his gaze that Essek has only seen in the cave when they cut each other open in search of recompense, and he knows suddenly, viscerally, to whom he prays. He prays to that light, to Caleb, to himself. They are their only absolution, and the only miracle they will ever receive is the work of their own hands.

**Author's Note:**

> WHEW. Hope you enjoyed. Let me know what you thought!
> 
> It is possible that I write more in this AU but also we'll see what other projects I get through before I come back lol.


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